Hal on JOI's and Mario's audience-films (pp. 395–396)

The father's central preoccupation, named by the son as a passing note. Before the Entertainment, Incandenza spent a whole "subphase" obsessed with "audiences' relationships with various sorts of shows" — not with stories or images but with the act of watching itself, the audience as his real subject. Every film Hal goes on to describe is a film about spectation: the carnival of eyeballs, the petrified theater, the audience filmed watching itself. The Entertainment isn't a departure from this obsession; it's its terminus. A man who spent his career studying what happens between an audience and a screen finally built the screen that resolves the relationship completely, that closes the distance between watcher and watched until the watcher is consumed. His whole filmography is the lab work; the samizdat is the result.